October 2014

August 14, 2013

OpenPOWER Consortium

Did you hear the big announcement last week? Google, IBM and
three other companies announced their plans to form the OpenPOWER Consortium‚ an open development
alliance based on IBM's POWER microprocessor architecture. The Consortium
intends to build advanced server, networking, storage and GPU-acceleration
technology."

Perhaps some of you had the same reaction to this news that
we did. After Googling to find out what on earth "GPU-acceleration
technology" is (and we're still a bit fuzzy about that), we began to
wonder - "What's in it for us?" or more specifically - what does this
mean for i?

We're software people. Who really cares about hardware?
Well, we care only to the extent that the hardware that supports IBM i continues
to exist and advance. The expected benefit of the consortium is to grow the
base of POWER, which should, in turn, ensure the continued growth of the
platform - to the Cloud and beyond.

The announcement - and particularly Google's participation
in it - seems to be oriented toward Cloud servers. We believe IBM i is a
particularly good platform for many types of Cloud applications, with its
legendary reliability and integrated security features. We hope that IBM will
also recognize that connection and maybe IBM i will have a role in their Cloud
plans.

The last really big POWER news story was Watson - the “Jeopardy!”-winning
system, which has since been busy in many more practical applications of that
fascinating technology. We have followed the whole Watson story with great
interest. It is one of the most innovative applications of software and
database imaginable. But it's only specific relevance to those of us interested
in IBM i is the fact that it runs on POWER. So much like the #OpenPOWER Consortium
announcement, the impact on us is the resulting advancement of the POWER
platform.

We're going to be following this story as it unfolds over
the coming months. After all, the future of POWER is the future of #IBMi.

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